1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to agricultural implements, and, more particularly, to agricultural field tillage implements.
2. Description of the Related Art
Field tillage is an important initial aspect of agricultural crop planting and harvesting. In the spring when good weather prevails, it is desirable to accomplish tilling of fields in a fairly short time with a minimum of interruption. Occasionally, obstacles such as large rocks are encountered which interrupt or interfere with continued tilling. Large rocks or other impediments have the potential to damage the tilling machinery. To avoid or minimize equipment damage, spring biasing of the soil working tools is frequently employed. On some equipment, a set of soil working tools such as disks, are coupled to a spring pack which has one or more coil compression springs coupled to allow limited vertical motion of the disks when one or more of those disks encounters enhanced resistance to the forward motion of the implement. The spring pack is configured as a toggle mechanism which, when potentially damaging resistance is encountered, trips and rotates over center so that the set of disks remains in a fixed position interrupting tilling until the machinery is stopped and the spring pack reset. This resetting is a very time consuming process. Simply blocking the spring pack so that it can not toggle past center solves the problem, but raises the potential of significant damage to the equipment.